Ice Dragon

After that it was a simple matter for those leaders of the anti-Treduk movement who were also leaders of the Union (she smiled as she said that, and Blade's anticipation was rewarded ten times over-it gave her a radiance like a great rose in full bloom) to call out their followers and stage a riot at a convenient place on the road to Treniga. After that, fifteen Union people carefully disguised as Civil Guards and equally carefully placed nearby in advance had come charging to the rescue. They had intimidated the rioters (who might very well have actually killed Blade and his companions), dealt with those soldiers not already dealt with more drastically by Blade, and made off with all the prisoners.

Blade himself, she went on severely, had very seriously complicated what had been pla

By this time, no doubt, he was wanting to know more about the Union. For many Graduki, including perhaps herself, the desire to help the Treduki smash the Ice Dragons perhaps rose from guilt-guilt that the Ice Master himself was (or had been) Graduk. As for who the Ice Master was, there Stramod could tell a better story than she could. For he himself was an early creation of the Ice Master, and he and those like him could say much about the nature of the enemy. Blade, by now becoming slightly bored, said politely that nothing was more important than knowing the nature of the enemy, and nodded to the mutant to tell his story.

The Ice Master, it seemed, was actually the greatest scientist the Graduki had ever produced. His field had been biology and genetics, and with that knowledge plus great surgical skills he had been the first to design living creatures to specific requirements, as one would design a van or a warflier. He had succeeded in developing many such versions of the lower animals; then he had started on humans.

«I am one of his earlier creations, where he still knew such a thing as caution-not scruples, merely caution out of fear of failure. There were others like me, and because our minds were almost normal, we soon revolted against the Master. By this time he had gone on and created many less normal beings from human stock, using them for guards, slaves, gifts to his allies on the Supreme Council, and so on. We had to fight them, and in the fighting many of them and many of us were killed. But we made such an uproar that the secret of what he was doing could no longer be kept. His allies on the Council fell from office, and he himself was forced to flee. He went north into the glacier land, taking with him some of his creations and no doubt much of his equipment, for otherwise how could he have created the Ice Dragons? Their riders are no problem; they are merely prisoners from the villages, trained and conditioned. But the Ice Dragons show that he must have advanced his knowledge much beyond even what it was when he fled. In twenty years one can do much.»

One can indeed, thought Blade. But he was not sure whether that included a biologist and surgeon learning the physics and electronics necessary to create by the hundreds the wands and Masters' suits. And how did the Ice Master keep himself supplied, if indeed he skulked in the icy wastes to the north? No, the Union leaders were either not considering all the facts-or considering them and rejecting the conclusion to which they might lead.

«In any case,» Stramod was going on, «five years ago the Ice Dragons appeared, ravaging Treduk villages. The Council immediately decided that the Ice Master was creating them, and sending them out as a warning of his new powers. If we aided the Treduki, the Master might hurl something far worse than the Dragons against us-a mutated plague virus, or worse. They expelled from their ranks all who would not accept this, and the Conciliators now rule as a dictatorship.»

«We must be somewhat just to them,» put in Doctor Leyndt. «The people fear and despise the Treduki so much that an alliance with them would probably have brought down the people's wrath on the head of any Council that proposed it.»

«True enough,» said Stramod sourly. «Your people, Leyndt, are not noted for tolerance of the strange or different.» There was an ugly bitterness on the blue face as he said that.

Leyndt put a gentle hand on his arm. «Don't let it fester, my comrade. You have found a home here, and work to do-work that in the end will confound and convert those who scorned you.»

«I hope so,» he said shortly.

Leyndt went on. «But the Ice Dragons must be stopped, first, and then the Ice Master's allies tracked down, his lair discovered, and both destroyed. Our Union has sworn this, but we also know that we must operate in the shadows, to the very end. The Council would willingly destroy us for risking the wrath of the Ice Master; the people for cooperating with the disease-ridden Treduki. Perhaps afterward, when the Ice Master is gone and the Treduki have fought side by side with us against him, we can reveal what we have done. But I fear that we shall all of us, even if successful, go to the cremation chambers in the end with none knowing how much we have done.» She said the last with a sober pride.

Blade was nodding. Though he now knew much, he still wanted to know more. «But that is only the last twenty years, you said? What about the glaciers? Nilando said they had been advancing for a thousand years.» He tried to strike a light note. «I doubt the Ice Master was responsible for those, even if he now lives among them.»

«You're right,» said Leyndt with a smile, and as she smiled she again seemed to glow with a clean, calm flame. «Our astronomers were fairly primitive a thousand years ago, but what they left in their records is enough to suggest what happened. A vast mass of gas and dust moved into our planetary system from interstellar space and cut off much of the light of our sun from our planet for over two hundred years. Over two-thirds of the population died during those two centuries, with most fleeing into the tropics and becoming our ancestors. Those who stayed farther from the equator found themselves too busy surviving to retain much of their civilization, and so they became the ancestors of the Treduki.

«After two centuries, the cloud drifted out of the system again, and disappeared into space. But the damage had been done. Our world's climate had been altered, and the glaciers were inexorably on the march, faster and farther than they could ever have done in the normal course of climatic cycles. The cloud was a most rare and strange astronomical phenomenon, from what we know today. One of the few things about which the Council still permits free debate is its nature and origins. The astronomers are divided into factions that battle almost as savagely as the Treduki battle against the Ice Dragons.»

Blade wondered if any of the astronomers had thrown into the debate the theory he himself now held. No doubt it would have been violently attacked. But the uproar might have started some people thinking along new lines. Or, as he had asked himself before-perhaps people had already gone through the same line of reasoning as he had, but shied away from the conclusion to which it led? He would not be surprised. It was a frightening conclusion.

Consider. Electronics beyond anything even the Graduki appeared to have. Ice Dragons in numbers that would have required a huge biological factory. How to build and supply one in the northern wastes? And a thousand years ago, a cloud of dust and gas moving purposefully from interstellar space, hanging in place long enough to tip the world's climate toward a new, fast-moving glacial age, and then departing. A cloud for which the astronomers could not agree on a natural explanation.